17 seconds: how to cut call wait times and deliver better customer experience

When a CallSwitch One partner calls our support team, they wait an average of 17 seconds to reach a person. Not so long ago, that figure was two and a half minutes.

The 17 seconds counts both the time spent waiting in the queue and the time the call spends ringing through to an agent. Many providers only report queue wait time, which hides the ringing that can add minutes to a call. We measure the full journey because that's what the caller actually experiences.

For context, we shared at North Star 26 that the UK's biggest providers average around two and a half minutes, with some well beyond that. Most vendors simply don't publish the number.

This guide shares exactly what we did, so you can help your customers do the same.

Why the whole wait matters

A caller doesn't care whether they're waiting in a queue or listening to a phone ring. To them, it's all time spent not being helped.

That's why measuring queue time on its own can be misleading. A call can be picked up by the queue in seconds, then ring around a group of busy agents for minutes. The report looks healthy while the customer gets more frustrated.

Long waits have a cost you can measure: abandoned calls. When we started focusing on the full wait, our own call abandonment rate fell from around 6% to 2%. Every one of those calls is a customer who got an answer instead of hanging up.

Our best-practice guide to cutting wait times

There's no silver bullet. Our wait time came down through lots of small, constant changes, all made in CallSwitch One. Here's what worked, whether you're running your own support line or setting up queues for your customers.

1. Measure wait and ring time together

Start with an honest number. Track the combined time a caller spends queuing and ringing, alongside calls answered and calls abandoned.

CallSwitch One Pro includes call queues with live wallboard analytics and scheduled reports. Set them to arrive in a manager's inbox every week, so the numbers get looked at without anyone having to remember.

2. Put the numbers where your team can see them

We run our wallboards on big screens. When the whole team can see the queue, people react to it.

The Queue Management panel, part of the Advanced Analytics add-on, brings the same view into the CallSwitch One desktop app. Agents see live queue performance at their desk, and supervisors get alerts when service levels slip, while callers are still waiting.

3. Staff for your peaks, not your averages

Averages hide the moments customers remember. Look at when calls arrive by hour and by day, then match cover to demand.

For some businesses, that might mean busy mornings, Mondays or lunchtime peaks. For example, your analytics might reveal a dip in Wednesday lunchtime performance, when teams tend to take their breaks at the same time. Once you can see where the bottleneck is, it becomes much easier to address.

4. Keep tuning queues, hierarchies and overflows

Your call flow shouldn’t be something you set up once and leave untouched. Regularly reviewing your queue flows, call distribution and overflow settings can help you respond to changing call patterns and keep customers moving through efficiently.

With CallSwitch One’s drag-and-drop call routing, you can make changes in minutes. Build and adjust flows using call queues, hunt groups, IVR menus, call forwarding, voicemail and time diaries, giving you the flexibility to adapt your call handling as your business changes.

5. Route callers to the right person first time

Every transfer adds another wait. Use IVR menus to send callers to the right team before they join a queue, and time-of-day routing so out-of-hours calls go somewhere useful.

Time-of-day routing and hunt groups are included with CallSwitch One S. Multi-level IVR menus come with Pro.

6. Let agents manage their own availability

A call ringing to someone who has stepped away is wasted time. With the Queue Management panel, agents log in and out of queues from the desktop app, and supervisors can manage availability across the team.

7. Give agents the context to resolve calls quickly

The faster each call is handled, the sooner an agent is free for the next one. CRM integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho and others pop up the caller's record as the phone rings.

AI Call Insights then writes up each recorded call with a summary, transcript and suggested next steps. That cuts the time agents spend on notes between calls.

8. Give customers another way in

Not every inquiry needs a phone call. CallSwitch One's WhatsApp Business add-on gives teams a shared inbox for their existing WhatsApp Business number, and business SMS handles confirmations and updates. Moving simple enquiries off the phone keeps queues clear for the calls that need a person.

What's included where

The same experience for every partner

The 17 seconds isn't reserved for our biggest accounts. Every CallSwitch One partner calls the same support line and reaches the same team, whether they manage five seats or five thousand.

The same approach runs through the rest of our support:

• Tickets: our average first reply has fallen from around two hours to 43 minutes, against a target of under an hour. Every ticket is triaged by a person and sent to the agent with the right skills.

• Feedback: every ticket rated bad gets a personal follow-up call, and the lessons feed into weekly team reviews.

• Porting: a 100% porting satisfaction score so far this year, across a team that ported 40,000 numbers last year.

And the tools behind it are the same ones your customers can use. A ten-person reception and a large service desk can run the same queues, wallboards and reports on CallSwitch One. Great customer experience shouldn't depend on the size of the business.

Start with one queue

You don't need to change everything at once. Pick your busiest queue, measure the full wait, and work through the steps above one at a time.

Already a CallSwitch One partner? Talk to your BDM about which customers run call queues today, and how Pro and the Queue Management panel can help them see and fix wait times live. Contact your BDM.

Not a partner yet? Find out what it's like to work with a vendor that answers in 17 seconds. Become a partner - Contact us